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Comment by f1nlay | Hacker News Reader

Was working on the very same idea alongside a friend of mine, we happened to launch a few weeks ago. Quite a lot more fleshed out than Neal's version, if anyone wants to check it out!

https://allchemy.io/

Edit: sorry if anyone is bumping into errors! We're running into bottlenecks with our supposedly auto-scaling database - working on it

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I think the slow animation + fullscreen notification removes a good portion of the fun of the game. The stats are neat, but I wonder if using a log feed (like a killfeed in call of duty) would be a more enjoyable experience for the user. I love how fast infinite craft is to iterate through the combinations while the "allchemy" approach makes it feel like I have a crafting time attached to every new combination

Just tagging here to say I enjoy the site, but I agree with my parent ^ the popup slows me down

Absolutely +1 Came here to say this

I love it and agree with other commenters on animations. Any traction on subscriptions? I'm always curious if there's a biz model that works for this kind of game on web (besides ads). It's funny because I think you could absolutely sell it for $4.99 on the app store if you throw it in a native shell but I have a hard time imagining people paying for it in their browser. Would be happily surprised if that's not the case!

Love it. Would it be possible to speed up the animations?

Will add an ability to speed up/outright disable animations in the next update! Was a bit of an oversight on our part as once you start amassing a decent amount of items you encounter the new item animation less frequently - but in the early game it's definitely quite irritating!

is this completely independently developed? the literal exact same idea at the same time? crazy

This idea is pretty common, I remember playing a similar game on my iPod Touch nearly 10 years ago

Maybe this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=caKj6rGEdyM. I was obsessed with this for about a week in high school.

Completely independently! We're a team of two University students funding this out of our own pockets. About 8 months work (on and off) from first prototype.

They're both inspired by Little Alchemy 1 & 2, PopCap's Alchemy, or if we really squint, The Incredible Machine from 1993.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Incredible_Machine

wow, I totally forgot, thanks! I remember playing that game or a derivative, I think on my father's 386 sometime around 1995?

Come to think of it, LLMs with the right prompts would be pretty handy for a Scribblenauts clone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scribblenauts

Probably outputting a format supporting the same characteristics as the Object Editor: https://scribblenauts.fandom.com/wiki/Object_editor

OH GOD THANK YOU! I was playing this on a Packard Bell Windows '95 PC with integrated loud speakers and a mic. Super high tech for the time.

BUT: The German-language full version of that game had been pre-installed in the Start Menu (?!), so if you deleted the start menu entry by accident, you'd need to reinstall Windows to get that game back. Or at least, that was young me's solution to the problem.

Also "The Alchemy Game" from 1997.

https://archive.org/details/msdos_Alchemy_Game_The_1997

You have to reallllly squint to see Incredible Machine in these. These are basic associations, not physical interactions. The closest you get to IM is "what happens if I stick these two things together" but it's more guessing and less input output.

In IM, you know what each thing does and see the output of each action, so you can iterate: placement, angle, special attributes like fire or light. It's not just stack two possibly related icons to see what you get. With these you either know the association exists or you're doing conceptual guesswork. There's no testing and iterating on a hypothesis, at a point once all known associations have been exhausted, iteration looks like permutation.

This idea is super old. There was a game like this that was popular like 10 years ago. This is a worse version.

This is so much fun.

I was just the first to craft MUCK ASTLEY... definitely gave me a good laugh

Glad to hear you're enjoying it - an excellent item to discover!

Good work! What kind of traction are you getting on the premium version? That approach is sensible given the underlying costs. Would love to get an idea of how it worked out in practice.

Does this also use generative AI to create the results?

the animations are tedious

You should be able to click right through them - but agreed. Will add an option to disable them in the near future!

I like them.

I assume these sites are about exploring lots of different things, even if they don't work as much as some would like.

This. Duolingo is in the same vein which interrupts my flow. Animations shouldn't continuously block the interaction of the experience. The majority should probably be ancillary and be a visual flourish.

If you use Duolingo app on a phone that supports power saving mode, it significantly cuts down the animations.

This is like Quake vs. modern games.

In Quake, you get the story in the booklet and it's up to you to learn the game.

In modern games you're constantly interrupted with an explanation of what you can do, should do, and so on.

I love this one (Infinite Craft) because it's up to you to discover and discovery is really fast because nothing interrupts you.

allchemy.io should have a mode without animations and explanations, maybe explanations when you hover over crafted objects on the right pane.

> In Quake, you get the story in the booklet and it's up to you to learn the game.

Or any old console game. Part of the fun was cracking open the little instruction pamphlet and reading all about each enemy and each weapon with little pictures etc.

Worth noting that Allchemy lets you peer through every single item generated by anyone, via the Itempedia: https://allchemy.io/items

You can find some interesting stuff!

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